Look, I made some jewelry!

I know it's been true lately that the only way a new reader would really know this is supposed to be a jewelry blog is from the name. Well, I guess there's some jewelry-related stuff in the sidebar, too. There just hasn't been much jewelry-related content. So that's why I'm excited to finally have some.

First of all, we have some earrings:

This is not a great picture, particularly because the two cat's-eye beads don't pick up the light equally. They look much better on my ears, or alternatively, on the 123Bead website, where I got the stuff to make them, so you might want to look at their picture instead. (They sell a kit to make one pair for $3.95, which is pretty reasonable, I thought, and is how I bought mine, or they sell the beads and findings separately.) These are just about the world's easiest earrings to make - they come with a really long headpin, and you just put the bead and the cone on the headpin, make a loop, add the earwires, and you're done.

Then today I took a class at Antiques Beads where we made watches. I got two and a half watches done in class so I thought that was pretty good. (Although actually the class was supposed to be over at 3:30 and most of us were still there at 5:00, so I guess it's not quite as amazing as it might have been!)

The two finished watches both used watch faces I already had, both of which came from Fire Mountain, I think. The blue ceramic beads came from Michael's - I had it in my head that I needed a blue watch. The great coppery beads were ones I had bought at Antiques Beads the day I signed up for the class, and they were gone today so it's good that I didn't wait! The other watch face I bought today - the store had a whole lot of watch faces that were $7.95, which seems like a good price to me. I know I've paid more than that for most of the ones I've bought in the past, anyway. (Plus you get 20% off on things you buy the day of a class, so it was actually, what, 6-something.) I also bought a bunch of round Swarovskis and some bead caps to make one more watch, because Donie, who taught the class, had brought a sample that was made like that and it was really pretty. About half the class ended up making one like it. I had another rectangular face like the one above so I used that and made it earlier tonight. I'll post a picture of that one later. It's terribly elegant. I had made watches in the past but I learned a lot of new techniques so I'm glad I took the class.

Tattoo earrings, and fun with Patera

I made these earrings a couple of days ago and I really like them - they look adorable on. They are not all that long, but they swing around just enough, as far as I'm concerned. Enough to be a bit eye-catching, I guess you'd say, without being so big they bother me.

I'm having a terrible time getting decent pictures of any of my pendants, but here's one:

This is one of the first ones I did with diamond glaze. I like it despite its imperfections - the resin is wavy and dips in the middle and kind of slops over the edges a bit. But it still looks cute, and that's what matters, right? It's a little over an inch wide - I think it came on a fancier chain, actually, and I decided it was too formal for this piece and went with plain old bead chain. I'll use the fancy one for something else!

(Added: if you click on the link below the next picture, you can see what I was calling the "fancy" chain - the one with the sort of vine motif.)

This next one is an especially bad picture, so I apologize in advance, but at least you can see the pieces:

These are little earrings (only about 1/2" wide) that basically came pre-made - wires on them and all, I mean - so all you have to do is put some artwork in there and seal it up. This artwork came from paperwishes.com - they have some books of artwork especially for jewelry, called "Easy Peasy", which are made to go with Patera findings and/or memory glass. I've been wearing these a lot.

This one is imperfect (like all of them) but I like it anyway. It has some match artwork which I bought on Stampington's download page (here) and then I added some glitter and some little microbeads. The artwork got sort of obscured by everything else, but it still looks cute and you can still tell it's a bird so oh well.

(Photo backgrounds courtesy of my Claudine Hellmuth class - we're making a little chipboard book so I put it to work already.)

Earrings, and a necklace

I made another pair of decoupage cylinder earrings:

Actually I don't know that I ever put a picture of the other pair like this here, although they're in the Etsy shop and you should be able to see them in the widget over to the right of this entry. Both of these are completely unrelated to the round decoupage beads which my sister has been making, and which I have not managed to get into a completed form yet. I bought these beads - the paisley cylinders - from Etsy seller ParrishLin a few weeks ago. I bought a wholesale lot of earring pairs, basically - there were nine pairs and they were all different. Furthermore, she said that this was a trial run, that it was her original design and she does not intend to make any more of these, which means that each pair is genuinely one of a kind. I like them, they have a fun sort of hippie-boho vibe to them. Hopefully somebody besides me will like them too! However, the pair above is the one I decided I'm keeping for myself. (You can also get a view of parts of my organizational system on top of my jewelry table, there. It's still not terribly well-organized but it's improved greatly from a few weeks ago.)

Here's a pair of earrings that probably will be showing up on Etsy - they are also a bit different, but I really like them:

They are rough-cut stars of some stone, and I put gunmetal findings on them. I think it matches perfectly.

This pair will also be going up, I think - dark red lampwork beads by Amy Houston:

 

Oh, and here's the necklace I was talking about the other day, with the crystal beads:

It's not anywhere near finished - I'm trying to figure out how to space out the beads and how far up to go with the beaded dangles. It goes pretty fast, though, and it's giving me a lot of good wire-wrapping practice!

In my non-beading life...

It may be November, but it's not really what you'd call cold yet, here on the Texas coast. I haven't even put on a sweater yet, although I have been grabbing an extra throw when I go to bed. (It doesn't help that my husband keeps turning the a/c back on every time he gets hot.) We've had lovely weather the last few days but apparently we're supposed to be getting rain next.

In other non-jewelry news, I finally got my WoW character to level 80! This is a big deal. We - my friend Col and I, that is - have been playing WoW off and on for a year and a half, now (we took some time off to play LOTRO for a while). We were trying to finish Northrend by next week when our memberships run out, but I think we're going to give in and pay for one more month, rather than rush through the endgame. I feel all leet and stuff, though, which is not a feeling I'm used to. There are plenty of people in WoW who would laugh at that idea, though, level 80 or not - I can't be 'leet because we don't raid and thus don't have the fancy gear that you get from raiding. But I could care less about that, really.

I went to Tuesday Morning earlier, and I found a jewelry kit meant for kids with the papers and stuff to make rolled paper beads, which is something I've been meaning to try, so I bought it. (The kit retailed for $16.99, which I would not have paid, but for $6.99? heck yes.) I will report back on the results.

And because it's not an entry without a picture, here's the earrings I made from clay rounds I bought at Winchell Clayworks:

2nd Etsy item up!

I'm having, like, performance anxiety issues with my Etsy jewelry. I think everything I put up has to be PERFECT. But I finally did get a pair of earrings that I decided passed muster. They are moss agate leaves:

(The listing is here.)

I was disappointed because I had a pair of big faceted quartz rondelles that I thought would make great earrings, and the second one turned out to have no usable hole at all. (Lesson: double-check the holes in gemstones before you start thinking you have an earring pair.)

What I was doing in March

Journal entry from March 7:

I took a jewelry class this week. I only got one pair of earrings (out of four) actually finished in the class, because I was sort of slow getting the hang of the technique, but I finally did, more or less, and I can now actually make wrapped loops. Which is something I've been meaning to learn for ages. So yay me.

Here are the three pairs of earrings I eventually got finished. The fourth pair was a chandelier with Swarovski bicones, and I was having trouble with them - like I said, I had a little trouble getting the hang of wrapped loops. I worked and worked on them, and finally I thought, "I don't really even want these earrings, why am I beating myself up over this?" And I took them apart and used the bicones on something else. I have the chandelier findings and I'll probably re-make the earrings eventually, but I don't wear chandeliers - I prefer just straight dangles or drops like the ones above - so they will probably end up as a gift for somebody. (Or you may see them in my Etsy store, even!)

I had signed up for two classes at the same time - that was the first one, above, and the second one was a peyote class. Now, as I think I have already noted somewhere below, I don't really do seed beads, normally, but I thought it wasn't a bad idea to know the theory. But I actually ended up making 2 peyote pieces, although the first one never quite got finished. That was this:

These are hex beads in sort of an iris color. I got this piece long enough to do a bracelet - which is what it's supposed to be - and then I decided it was really wider than I wanted for myself, and I made another one that was only 4 beads wide instead of 6:

And I did finish this one, as you can see, and I have worn it quite a lot all this year. (It actually has a little stripe woven into it, but it just really doesn't show up in most kinds of light. Every once in a while I'll see a little flash of it, but mostly not!)


And I will finish up by showing you another, non-class-related, bracelet that I made around the same time. It's kyanite coins from Magpie Gemstones, and it's actually one of my favorite things I've ever made, because these are just gorgeous stones.

(I also put my very favorite toggle on it, which I think came from the now-departed Bead Connection.)

My fun 2008

Here's some more of the jewelry I was making last year:

The earrings at the top are aquamarines - somewhat mismatched, as you can see - and the bracelet and watch are glass. I seem to have been on a blue and green kick last year. (I love blue and green; I always use them a lot, but it does seem like I was using them an awful lot at this time.)

So. When you look at my Livejournal for last year, there's this big gap in my jewelry-talk for several months. There's a lot of talking about other things, but very little about jewelry. And that's because, as I mentioned before, there was this storm. (Ike, I mean.) The somewhat-shortened version is this: we decided at the very last minute to evacuate. We spent a few days at my aunt's house and then figured out that we weren't going to be able to get home or go back to work for at least a week or so, and we took off on a big road-trip to visit my husband's parents in Ohio. (We hauled nearly all my beads all the way there, too, jumbled up with a lot of other stuff in the back of Rob's Toyota.) The only other bead-related thing, while we were being displaced persons, was that while we were in Ohio, my friend Karen and I decided to meet up, and since she lives in the Detroit area, we decided on Toledo as a good sort-of-halfway meeting point. And since I had mentioned bead stores, she found one for us to visit - it turned out to be Meant To Bead, which is an awesome shop. If you're ever in Toledo, I highly recommend it. I know I bought a number of things there, but the one that I have photographic evidence of is this string of Czech glass rondelles (which, as you can see, got made into a bracelet later):

I love those colors and I never would have thought of putting the purple in there, but it really works.

Well, so anyway - back to the story - we got home, eventually, and we found a wet apartment and a landlord telling us that everybody who lived on the first floor had to move out so they could gut the whole floor (I think they had to go right down to the beams) and start from scratch. I don't really think it was liveable, anyway, but obviously we had a bad scramble for a while trying to get a new place and get moved and clean up the old place. And of course we also had to figure out how much of our stuff was salvageable, which luckily was quite a lot. There wasn't nearly as much water in our area as there was in other parts of town - the FEMA guy who looked at it said he thought it was about a foot, although there wasn't a really clear waterline.

So we found an apartment on the mainland and we got moved; my husband said he didn't want to live in Galveston and risk having to go through that again someday, although he has relented a bit on that recently. Meanwhile, we also had to go back to work. We both worked for the university medical center, which had been heavily damaged - Rob went back to work more or less as normal, but my office was in a building that wasn't habitable, and so we went into temporary quarters for a while, and then we worked at home for a while, and then in November the shoe dropped, and half my office was laid off, including me. Rob's job was ok, although his job duties were shuffled around a bit in this same process. I decided, after some flailing around about it, that I wasn't going to look for another job as a secretary, and I have been a student all this year, studying medical coding, and I should be done in a couple of months. Luckily our financial situation was such that I could do this. So while I have not done a huge amount of jewelry-making over the past year (I always feel like I ought to be studying!), my jewelry-making story does pick up again at the end of last year. And I'll cover that part later!

Earrings

So here's some of the earrings I was making early last year:




I think that I mentioned the green leaf beads in that past post - I never have seen any more beads like that to this day. Meanwhile, one thing I spent a lot of time making in that period was a lot of pairs of earrings like the ones on the left - I'm not quite as enamored of them as I was at the time, but they are still pretty nice earrings. They swing around and look cute, but they're not too big and/or showy to wear to work and such. I did a lot of variations on them, but they were all sort of similar to that: a bigger Czech bead, a smaller round or bicone in a coordinating color, and a couple of daisy or heishi spacers. It's a really quick pair of earrings to make, for one thing.

Mad scientists rule

Ooh, look, fractal earrings!

From Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

Weekend activities

I bought some goodies on Etsy this weekend and this is one of them - millefiori beads from this store. I am trying not to buy finished jewelry unless it's something really extraordinary that I absolutely could not make myself, and so far I've managed to restrain myself on that. But I have to buy some beads once in a while, at least! (I also did another Fire Mountain order while I was at it - more Czech beads and a lot of those brass heishi I like so much, and a few other odds and ends.)

The March Botmo box arrived, a huge box since it's actually two months' worth of the "Mother of All Magpie" size - I had ordered an extra month when Elise had her clearance sale a few weeks ago. This month's theme was water and the one I got from last year was something about mermaids so it really felt like they all went together. Late last night, I decided that I had to have aquamarine earrings and so I threw the two that (sort of) matched onto wires with a couple of copper heishi. I suspect that I will probably end up redoing them later. Silver really seems to go better with that pale aqua color, but at the time I liked the copper, and it does look cute. Anyway, they will do for now! (There may possibly be a picture later.)